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The Green Climate Fund (GCF) was established at U.N. climate talks in 2010 to channel a substantial portion of the $100 billion per year wealthy nations had pledged to mobilize by 2020 for developing-world efforts to curb carbon emissions and weather the impacts of climate change.
Ban told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that decisions by U.S. President Donald Trump to withdraw his country from the 2015 Paris Agreement on global warming, and to walk away from promises on climate finance jeopardized global commitments.
“I am deeply concerned that the GCF - while it has been really trying to work - has not been fully funded,” Ban said in an interview from South Korea, where the fund is also based.
“With the U.S. pullout of this (Paris) climate agreement, we are not sure whether $100 billion by 2020 will be met,” he added.
Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama pledged $3 billion to the GCF, but only $1 billion of that funding has been delivered.
Of a total of more than $10 billion committed to the fund, since 2015 it has allocated about $3.5 billion for projects in 78 countries to curb heat-trapping emissions and adapt to more extreme weather and rising seas.
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